


overwritten

by 13pens



Series: More Than the Shadows (of Each Other) [5]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Gen, Metafiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 20:04:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6534508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/13pens/pseuds/13pens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The atoms arrange. Her eyes open. There is something in her chest, an anger that feels like habit, and there is someone––a woman. She’s sleeping on the floor, tired, tranquil. Unaware. Defenseless.</p><p>A viable tool.</p><p>The body containing this consciousness reaches out her hand, and smears the woman out of existence. She hadn’t even learned her name."</p><p>Alternatively titled, "Fuck You OUAT"</p><p>(It is NECESSARY to have read the More Than the Shadows series, but this fic does not have to be included in the series itself.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	overwritten

**Author's Note:**

> First thing's first I'm the pettiest. I wrote a fuck-you fic on the anniversary of the episode that ruined a lot of things.
> 
> This is a fic written out of bitterness. It hurt. I'm probably not going to do it again lmao.
> 
> But mostly, it's a metafic on the symbolic effect canon had on how I could think of the characters I re-created, the world my friends and I built, and how it mangled everything good about them into something really grotesque. Canon is and was violence, y'all.
> 
> However, hopefully - it's about hope.
> 
> lmao anyways. shout out to the people who follow me on twitter and witness my periodic bouts of rage and crying over this bs. enjoy this last ouat fic from me.

It begins and ends with a woman named Marian.

 

We know this much: her name, her husband, and her son. We don’t know her family name. She had a father, whose horse her husband had stolen before they met, but we do not know him. We don’t know whose eyes or whose smile Marian had inherited, where she learned to carry herself or whose ears she turned to when she needed to whisper. We know she learned how to shoot a bow with ferocious precision and courage, but we don’t know when. Where she had even come from, what tongues she knew, what recipes, her favorite smells and colors and words––no one gets to find out. We know her name, her husband, her son. We don’t know how she fell in love, or how she chose her baby’s name. We don’t get to see.

 

Still there was so much you possibly _could_. There were so many stories to be told, multiple all at once, intertwining and creating intersections or knots or webs or not making any of those at all. She, like anyone, like everyone, was never just a _body_.

 

On a calendar day that corresponded to our April 12th, Maid Marian was evaporated out of existence in her sleep, stories and all.

 

* * *

 

One.

 

Zelena dreams of dying.

 

The last thing she remembers is the sharp sting of a dagger in her abdomen, the surrounding flesh around the knife hardening into a ceramic nightmare reminiscent of the hideous gnomes that decorate a specific corner of Gold’s shop, and shattering into nothing.

 

When the nothing turns into a loud gasp, into lavender tinted sunlight through purple curtains, and the softness of her body, her clothes, her bed, and most of all, the knowledge that she is not dead, she rolls over and sighs.

 

Yet something about the softness is antithetical, completely contradictory, to something that settles right in her stomach, right in the place where she had shattered into dust. It’s as if she’s not in her body, that this is the wrong body. That the right body is shattered. The right body is dust.

 

Zelena grumbles into her pillow. Who these days has the time or energy, really, to forget that they’re real.

 

——

 

Regina drops the half-washed cooking pan along with her jaw and perhaps her entire soul when she sees Zelena walk into the kitchen.

 

“Cripes,” Zelena winces, walking forward and reaching down to retrieve the pan. “What’d you do that for?”

 

Zelena deposits it in the sink and makes motions toward the dish towel, but when she turns, Regina is still immobilized with stupor, her hands still in the air, still opened from when she let go of the pan.

 

Regina looks into her eyes like she might cry. The hard feeling in Zelena’s abdomen returns again.

 

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Zelena says, trying to laugh, but her attempt is made flat; her entire being steeped in discomfort. “Knock that off, would you?”

 

Finally Regina moves, rubbing her hands together and shaking her head. “Sorry, ah, I don’t know what, ah.” She pauses, looks at Zelena, who is rightly unsatisfied with her mumblings. “Do you,” she begins tentatively, softly, in that voice she has when she’s scared, “Does––I don’t know why but before you walked in I thought you were––that, um.” She shakes her head, the words sounding ridiculous to her.

 

“That I was dead?” Zelena supplies.

 

Regina opens her mouth, closes it, then nods. Water gathers in her eyes. “That was unpleasant.”

 

Zelena considers whether she should tell her about the dream, about how she had been laying in bed with the conviction that everything was entirely wrong, down to her atomic arrangement. She sniffs the air and looks at the sink.

 

“What time is it? Did you have breakfast without me?”

 

“Oh,” Regina says, like forgetting is a habit of hers. She moves about the kitchen, rushed and clumsy. “Sorry. I did. Sorry. What would you like? I’ll make anything you like. Sorry.”

 

“Stop saying sorry. Banana pancakes. Mix in that chai powder from Barter Moe’s.”

 

“What? That’s tea.”

 

“It’s a disgrace. It’s better in the pancakes.”

 

“If you say so.”

 

——

 

The feeling of hardening and shattering doesn’t return. She goes about her day, has coffee with Tinker Bell, picks up a sandwich for Emma to leave at the station, sticks around for asilly game of darts with Robin before they get a call for a cat stuck in a tree, walks Henry home from school. Everything is as normal, the day is an equal balance of bright and grey, except it just feels like the entire world has been shifted two inches to the left.

 

“What’d you learn in school today?” Zelena asks. They’re having ice cream that she’d gotten them on the way if he promised not tell Regina she was the one who took her last Twinkie in the study drawer.

 

“Stuff,” he says. “Miss Fletcher was kind of weird today.”

 

“In what way?”

 

“Well we were supposed to be learning about the endocrine system. You know, because it’s a biology class.”

 

“Right.”

 

“But then we spent the whole period talking about that one Ray Bradbury short story. The one about the butterfly.”

 

“Uh-huh.”

 

“And she was asking us, if time gets rewritten––which it can, you know, with magic anything seems possible, and you almost did it yourself––“

 

“Yes, yes. The point. Get to it.”

 

“Well, like, when things change, do they change all at once, like hitting a reset button, or is it more like untying a huge knot?”

 

Zelena stops walking. She nearly drops the cone, just like Regina and the half-washed pan.

 

“Henry,” she says. “Perhaps tell Miss Fletcher to revisit her curriculum.”

 

——

 

Zelena feels like she is being unraveled. She gets the feeling that everyone feels like they are being unraveled, but they aren’t talking about it, even though they should.

 

When she goes to sleep, it’s all sounds and sirens in dispersed matter. Nothingness turns into blind movement, going forward and forward and then––backward, and backward, and backward until––

 

The atoms arrange. Her eyes open. There is something in her chest, an anger that feels like habit, and there is someone––a woman. She’s sleeping on the floor, tired, tranquil. Unaware. Defenseless.

 

A viable tool.

 

The body containing this consciousness reaches out her hand, and smears the woman out of existence. She hadn’t even learned her name.

 

* * *

 

 

Two.

 

When things change, it is like untying a huge knot.

 

This is what Regina learns at three in the morning, restless and despairing in the middle of Gold’s shop. Rumple sits on a stool with his hands perched on his cane, his head bowed. Belle grips at the binding of a book she had just shut.

 

They are all in mourning.

 

“Earlier this week, you went along your morning thinking that Zelena had died in her cell,” Rumple says. “And I had thought I killed her.”

 

Regina clenches her fist around the necklace she had been fidgeting with. “So what does that mean,” she says, eyes narrowing. “Sometime soon, you perform a time reversal? To what, to murder my sister?”

 

Rumple snarls, but shakes his head. “And where would I get the baby.”

 

“It’s bigger than that,” Belle says quietly. “Time isn’t just being rewritten. It’s being forcibly _over-_ written. Two timelines are converging, and it’s so powerful that it has no singular agent. It’s like a black hole, except it’s us that turns into nothing.”

 

Regina knits her brow. “That’s impossible.”

 

Belle leans back on a table, and sometimes Regina forgets that Belle is as old and tired inside as she is. “It’s happened lots of times, in theory. We’d just never know. We’re all stories, Regina. You’ve seen it in Henry’s book.”

 

“We’re not in a book now.”

 

“We don’t have to be,” Rumple says. “Some existences are more powerful than others.”

 

“And who gets to decide that?”

 

Rumple shrugs slowly, drained. Looking as old as he really is. “Certainly not us.”

 

Regina wants to fight, but where does she even start? What can she even do? She closes her eyes, tries to think of Zelena’s laugh and the way she hunches over Henry’s laptop to play Sims 4 and how she drools when she sleeps, but all she can retrieve is the image of an empty cell, the theft of any new beginning.

 

——

 

She finds Emma sitting on her porch with her hands in her red leather jacket and a scarf that belongs to Snow wrapped around her neck. There are circles under her eyes, and the way her entire being is composed reminds Regina of the night Emma had tried to take Henry.

 

“You have a key, Miss Swan,” Regina says. Her breath is visible in the air.

 

“Do I? Fuck, I forgot.” Emma laughs and it comes out pathetically. “I’ve been forgetting everything lately.”

 

Regina sits next to her on the steps, reaches out to hold her hand. Emma takes it and squeezes.

 

“I feel like I’m in two places at once,” Emma whispers, voice raspy. “Like what I’m feeling doesn’t go with what I’m seeing or what I’m doing. I keep having these dreams.”

 

“Emma,” Regina interrupts, tears welling up in her eyes. “You know what’s happening. Don’t make me tell you out loud.”

 

Emma leans her head on Regina’s shoulder and breathes. “Robin and I circled town searching for an open portal.”

 

“There isn’t one.”

 

“I know.”

 

“Emma.”

 

Emma shakes in Regina’s grip until she gets up with a pained shout, kicks at a pillar and throws down Snow’s scarf. Regina watches sadly, half heartedly tells her not to make too much noise or she’ll wake Zelena and Henry. Emma wrangles off a boot and throws it into a bush. She’s wearing socks Zelena got her for fucking Christmas.

 

“There has to be a way. Everything in my head is telling me there isn’t but I’m not going to believe it. Just how is it that we’re literally a town made out of magic and yet we’re all so _powerless_.”

 

She leans against the pillar she just tried to batter. Regina tugs at her hand to bring her back down next to her.

 

“I love you,” Emma says. “Shouldn’t that count for something?”

 

Regina holds Emma’s chin, kisses her cheek, then her lips.

 

“It does,” she says. “It does.”

 

* * *

 

 

Three.

 

Everybody is remembering different things, and nobody is looking at each other the same.

 

Zelena notices when the first thing she says to Robin when he walks into the living room is Marian’s name.

 

“Pardon?” The lines on his face have gone soft to hard. Regina grips at the neck of a wine bottle. Emma stares.

 

Zelena feels ill. “Her name was Marian. Your—“

 

“Zelena,” Regina says, a little too harshly. “This isn’t the time.” Implicit is the fact that they don’t have the time, they don’t have time.

 

“You murder her,” Robin says, quietly. There is no trace of rage on him, but his mouth is tight. Everyone’s eyes are on him. “And wear her body.”

 

The weight crushes Zelena completely. “It’s not me,” she begs. “That isn’t me.”

 

“We know,” Emma says. She says it but it’s belied by a frown. She pours herself a glass of cider.

 

It hits Zelena that none of them can look at her without seeing what she’s done.

 

Regina has to leave the room.

 

——

 

“Tell me what she was like.”

 

Robin stares down his wine glass, barely touched. Regina and Emma have gone to bed, and the boys had been asleep for hours. It’s just him and Zelena on the couch, sharing a feeling of exhaustion without drowsiness.

 

“It’s not going to matter if you know.”

 

“I don’t care. Tell me about Marian.”

 

“Don’t say––“ he exhales, puts down the glass for fear of dropping it.

 

Zelena narrows her eyes at him, and her voice begins to rise. “You do know that in this reality, in this version of events, Regina killed her, don’t you? How is it that she gets your mercy and beyond and you can’t even look me in the eye?”

 

Robin snaps his head up to her in disbelief, mouth hanging open and not even knowing where to start, and Zelena immediately regrets everything. She crosses her arms and turns inward and looks at the floor, shaking her head. “I can’t even separate who I am and who _that_ is now, how could I expect any of you to do the same?” she says, voice meek and tired.

 

It’s awkward now, stifling, and Robin sighs into his folded hands, elbows resting on bouncing knees.

 

Zelena can’t take it. She wishes this knot would become undone faster. “I should get to bed,” she says, standing up.

 

“Wait,” Robin says. “Please sit back down.”

 

So Zelena does.

 

——

 

When Robin relates this story to casual listeners, the story is that he and Marian had met because he had stolen her father’s horse. That was true––but more specifically, they had met because upon learning of his thievery, she had chased him down, and struck an arrow right into his shoulder. Falling over in pain preceded any kind of falling in love.

 

He hadn’t banded with any Merry Men yet. It was just him, a young foolish man whose home village was full of everything but food to eat and money to pay, who thought that a nobleman of Marian’s father’s stature wouldn’t miss one horse, especially when away on business.

 

And so he was ready to die, but she had done something odd. She had brought him into the manor not as a prisoner but as a patient. She saw to his recovery, all the while never even giving him the time of day beyond snide comments about the horse littered throughout his stay.

 

Before sending him off, he had expected to hear: “Steal from us again, and that arrow will be through your heart.”

 

Instead, she said: “I know what you do and admire it. But I can’t be a part of that.”

 

Two months later, when her father had passed and she was courted by the Sheriff of Nottingham, a walking antithesis to everything she loved, being a part of it was all she wanted to do. He had never seen a smile so bright.

 

——

 

The Marian in Robin’s memory is a Marian pregnant, tired, and humming softly as she traces circles around what would be Roland. The Marian in his memory clicked her teeth at the Merry Men but laughed at their bawdy humor all the same. Always kept her chin up and always looked you in the eye. Had the habit of tapping on surfaces with her fingers. Had a beautiful way of sneezing.

 

He can tell Zelena all this and it still feels incomplete. It doesn’t feel real. It’s looking at a person through a window through another. This Marian feels _made up_.

 

But that’s the thing that it boils down to, isn’t it—death is silence. Death closes your narrative and tosses it away, and all you can do is either remember or make it up.

 

——

 

Before the night closes he tells her one last thing. That he firmly believes, he really does, that were she here right now, Marian would love Regina, too.

 

That, to Zelena, at least, feels real.

 

* * *

 

Four.

 

Zelena and Regina talk about children.

 

“Violet,” Zelena says, playing with the ends of her hair.

 

Regina turns her head on the pillow to face her. “You would not.”

 

“What? It’s a perfectly acceptable name.”

 

Regina scoffs. “A lineage of colors.”

 

Zelena hums, ignoring the ridicule. She stares at the ceiling, still twirling her hair. “Everyone in this family would be raising that child. They would be surrounded by love, rivers and waterfalls of it.”

 

Regina makes something of a sound denoting agreement, but something about it sounds like she’s being chipped away, slowly.

 

“That’s not what it’s going to be like when this is over,” Zelena says. Her hand moves over her womb, empty today and full of something tomorrow. The weight ofeverything presses on her and she may burst. It wasn’t her. It _isn’t_ her. But that’s not going to matter as the timelines converge and the atoms rearrange, closer and closer and tighter and tighter.

 

“I’m going to be alone again,” she says, and as soon as she does any composure Zelena had pops out of existence. She cries, clutches at her skin. “I’m already alone. You can’t look at me without thinking of who I’ll become. All of this will be nothing.”

 

“No,” Regina says, tears falling quietly now, as she takes Zelena’s hand and brings it to her chest, hugs it. “It’s never just nothing. We matter. We count.”

 

Zelena takes her other hand and closes it around the balled mass of folded fingers, holding on to one another like the fabric of this lifetime would tear right at this moment. Holding on to what they’ve lived, to what they know, to what they love.

 

“Marian should have counted,” Zelena says. She feels the worlds rupture a little, and she steals a glimpse over the other side, where the sensation of wearing a dead woman’s body like a costume makes her feel sick, sick, sick.

 

“Marian should have counted,” Regina repeats, a shared admission of guilt.

 

* * *

 

Some existences are more powerful than others.

 

And so some existences need their proper goodbyes.

 

They spend their last moments out on the streets of Storybrooke, watching the skies turn from grey to a bright white, blinding. Hands are joined, squeezing. Regina’s hand is wrapped in a death grip around Zelena’s, an act of final resistance, even as all the memories are being overridden, anger and hate and hurt over love and compassion. Crying over her bleeding body tired of fighting never happened here. Zelena laughing her out of the room only to call her back in never happened here. Talking over lasagna. Sobbing about a little girl and her alien dog. ABBA. Waking up to toes. Laughing. Fighting. Headlocks and noogies. Swiffers flown into the sunset.

 

It doesn’t happen here. Regina still holds on.

 

In Zelena’s final moments, she is humming to the tune of "Chiquitita."

 

* * *

 

It begins and ends with a woman named Marian.

 

Zelena cheats the dagger-administered death and rematerializes, fresh in flesh and with a deep rage stitched into every fiber, every cell.

 

The rationale is that if someone else is suffering, if someone else is hurting––she won’t have to be. It’s that good old dialectic, a presence of something based on the absence of the other. This is what flickers in Zelena’s mind as she sees a woman on the floor, sleeping. Tranquil. Unaware. Defenseless.

 

A viable––

 

 _Marian_.

 

And then something goes wrong. It feels like she is unraveling. A presence of something based on the a presence of two. A sum that is more than its parts. More than the arrangement of atoms. Memories that are inaccessible as they are imaginary but still enough, enough to count what hadn’t been counted.

 

 _Some existences are more powerful than others_.

 

Zelena reaches forward, and there are no particles dispersed into the ether. She stirs Marian awake and meets eyes that have so much in them, so much all at once, _always kept her chin up, always looked you in the eye_.

 

They can hear the Queen’s army approaching. She holds out her hand, and says: “We need to run.”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Way before the writers decided to impregnate Zelena in the actual worst way, strangesmallbard and others and I made headcanons around fanon!Zelena being a mother. Like. How fucked up is that. They took EVERYTHING.
> 
> 2\. Lots of questions of trying to write Marian with agency arose, from way back a year ago when shit hit the fan and I was trying to come up with fix-it fics. And the fact of the matter was that, I couldn't. Nothing I could do in one one-shot could erase the symbolic violence that Marian's death--and allll the other expendable poc on ouat--had inflicted. And hopefully the injustice of that was reflected in the fic. I thought about rewriting in the end in which Marian stood up to Zelena successfully. But like. It's not her job to not be murdered by her oppressors lmao. It's directly Zelena's––and by extension, the writer's––responsibility, to not fucking kill women of color to decorate drama.
> 
> 3\. Regina Mills would never allow the purchase of the chai latte powder from Trader Joe's, but look. It needed to be publicly shamed _somewhere_. 


End file.
